“Four Years of App Store: Developers Weigh In On Search, Discovery, and Curation” — Epic @macstoriesnet post. http://t.co/K83DCZ2i

> Any time you are confronted with a real human being in any case, you usually go, “All right, I don’t really know what to think now.”

Whedon:

> There's getting together and there's breaking up. There's very little TV about the in-between.

> Double Feature is a great new iPhone app which is going to revolutionize drunken, late-night movie conversations in pubs, bars and kitchens the world over.

The origin of the term "Brat Pack".

Just for future reference:

> The company employs 40 full-time reviewers; at least two reviewers study each app...

In 2009, there were 40 people on the App Store review team.

`$ cat .ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh host 'cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'`

That. For MONTHS, I've been thinking "I should really switch to passwordless SSH login so when I'm pushing code to my server, I don't have to enter my password every. Single. Time." I kept putting it off because I assumed it would be complex. Guess what?

IT'S NOT.

- Interface hierarchy
- Pixel-perfection
- Subtlety & realism
- Make it look expensive
- Create a visual language

Image-less noise texture on UIViews! Crazy!

"This is a quickie pair of categories on UIAlertView and UIActionSheet which enables you to use blocks to handle the button selection instead of implementing a delegate."

Directory of URL schemes that iPhone apps support.

Key AppleScript key code
esc 53
F1 122
F2 120
F3 99
F4 118
F5 96
F6 97
F7 98
F8 100
F9 101
F10 109
F11 103
tab 48?
` 50
1 18
2 19
3 20
4 21
5 23
6 22
7 26
8 28
9 25
0 29
[ 27
] 24
delete 51
' 12
, 13
. 14
p 15
y 17
f 16
g 32
c 34
r 31
l 35
/ 33
= 30
42
a 0
o 1
e 2
u 3
i 5
d 4
h 38
t 40
n 37
s 41
- 39
return 36
; 6
q 7
j 8
k 9
x 11
b 45
m 46
w 43
v 47
z 44
space 49
enter 52
left 123
up 126
down 125
right 124

Free, beautiful fonts.

“Lt. Colonel (United Kingdom) Percival Harrison Fawcett (18 August 1867 – in or after 1925) was a British artillery officer, archaeologist and South American explorer.
Along with his eldest son, Fawcett disappeared under unknown circumstances in 1925 during an expedition to find "Z" – his name for what he believed to be an ancient lost city in the uncharted jungles of Brazil.”

Dude was a real-life Indiana Jones.

"Googie architecture is a form of modern architecture, a subdivision of futurist architecture influenced by car culture and the Space and Atomic Ages. [...] Features of Googie include upswept roofs, curvaceous, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass, steel and neon. Googie was also characterized by Space Age designs depicting motion, such as boomerangs, flying saucers, atoms and parabolas, and free-form designs such as "soft" parallelograms and an artist's palette motif."

It's that Jetsons-American-Graffiti-Jack-Rabbit-Slim's look.

Great introduction. I've finally started using Sass for my web projects.

"While Lucas now claims that they be viewed chronologically in episodic order, they have in fact been made primarily for the audiences of their time of production. Each sequel--1980, 1983, 1999, 2002, and 2005--built upon the film that came before it and is dependent on audience familiarity with the preceding occurrences ... The originals were constructed in such a way as to preserve the dramatic suspense of not knowing the revelations that follow (i.e. Yoda's identity, Leia and Anakin's familial relation to Luke, the true powers of the Emperor, etc.), while the prequels do not respect this structure and hence introduce unintended structural flaws in the last episodes."

"Sequels are designed not only by filmmakers who are cognisant of what has already transpired, but they are targetted to an audience that is as well. When John Conner says "I'll be back," in Terminator: Salvation, it was saluting fans of the original who were familiar with the famous line from the previous films, and made more ironic since the line was originally uttered by Conner's nemesis."

So much great stuff here. tl;dr: they make sense in production order, not episodic order, no matter what Lucas says.

"The single strongest impression [Star Wars] leaves is of another great American tradition which involves lights, bells, obstacles, menace, action, technology, and thrills. It is pinball-on a cosmic scale."

1978 profile of Lucas from The Atlantic.

Great notes on a great talk.

I keep coming back to this.

"There is a popular belief in Japan, Korea, and other Asian countries that a person's ABO blood type or ketsueki-gata (血液型?) is predictive of his or her personality, temperament, and compatibility with others,[1] similar to how astrological signs are used, though blood type plays a much more prominent role in Japanese society than astrology does in the West."

"When something looks "off" in an interface, it probably looks fake, like it wouldn't exist in the real world."

"This is one of the best resources of iOS designers"

— via @willw

[quote]

A great quote from Steve Jobs in 1995, and a nice echo of my earlier Steve Jobs remembrance post:

"Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You'd actually build this thing yourself.

I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one a understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation but maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean you looked at a television set you would think that 'I haven't built one of those but I could. There's one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I've built two other Heathkits so I could build that.'

Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way."

[end quote]

"In a hundred years, perhaps he will have been reduced to a caricature. History does that. Maybe he’ll be seen as some genius inventor who created the first computers in his garage. It won’t be an accurate image, necessarily, when seen through the mists of time. But I have a hard time thinking he won’t be remembered."

"Most other sites represent the idea of a favorite with an icon of a heart. But Mr. Cuervo felt a disconnect between love and the less extreme notion of liking. "We wanted Like to not have that heavy weight," he said."

"The end result is that, with zombies enabled, messages to deallocated objects will no longer behave strangely or crash in difficult-to-understand ways, but will instead log a message and die in a predictable and debugger-breakpointable way. This is the tool to use when trying to track down over-releases and premature releases."

It's the Kurosawa one where the story's told four times from four different points of view.

"The curse of success is that we move slower and it’s a confusing curse. See, we’ve been successful and the result of that success is that we’re able to hire more people to do the seemingly impossible amount of work our success has created. But each person we add to do more work strategically slows us down. Each additional person levies a communication tax and unless we figure out how to constantly improve our communication, we’re just going to get slower."

One fun trick involving ^^:

> $ ls -al
>
> $ ^-al^-lash
> ls -lash

Behind-the-scenes photos from the original trilogy.

"Filmmaking is essentially the art of sustaining the suspension of disbelief: from shot to shot, scene to scene."

At the end of the day, real-world constraints of making movies > diegetic consistency.

"Ager’s thesis seem to be: Since Kubrick was a perfectionist, anything that seems like an error in Kubrick’s work must not be an error, but must instead be a deliberate choice... I’m sure there is a more official name, but let’s call this situation the genius fallacy."

Commence using the term "the genius fallacy".

> For the last couple of apps I’ve made, I’ve been creating a sort of mind map to help me come up with the name.

THE GREATEST SAFARI EXTENSION.

Replaces my old Saft/Keywurl/GLIMS workflow — keyword searches with no hacks!

Nice roundup of the Pixar references in Pixar films.

"
"During 90 percent of your workday, you're in this box -- you get to do only certain things," said Polson. "And yet we're all here because we love movies and art. At Pixar University, all the boxes get removed. All the walls come down, and you get to be the director of your own creative idea." Polson has taken classes in drawing, screenwriting, and color, and he's completed a course in which he made his own short film.

Not long after the improv class, Polson met Catmull again, this time to present a work-related proposal. "I'm sitting here with the founder of our industry, and I'm trying to pitch my idea," he said. "If I hadn't had the chance to whack him with a balloon, I don't think I would have functioned."
"

"
"Nuance is the first casualty of non face-to-face communication," [Mike Monteiro] explains. "And complex emotions need a complex delivery mechanism like the human face. I'm not sure I'd want social networks to handle emotions beyond the most banal; 'liking.' What if we could hit a button for 'outrage?' How many of us would mistake that for actual effort? And if I told you all I had cancer do I want you clicking the sad emoticon button? I'd beat cancer just to kick your ass."

"We should put our energy into designing things to make people's lives better, not to make society more emotionally infantile. We used to design things to take us to the moon, now we design things to keep us from getting out of bed."
"

"Success hides problems."

"This is a list of songs used by Apple Inc. in commercials, keynote addresses, presentations, and other marketing materials."

"Most existing Python modules for sending HTTP requests are extremely verbose and cumbersome. Python’s builtin urllib2 module provides most of the HTTP capabilities you should need, but the api is thoroughly broken. It requires an enormous amount of work (even method overrides) to perform the simplest of tasks.

Things shouldn’t be this way. Not in Python."

I have the weirdest thing for Original-Trilogy-era George Lucas.

Variables, mixins, nested rules, functions, and more in CSS.

Nice roundup of icons.

How to install a bookmarklet on iOS.

Guy 100%s Super Mario 64 using only his feet to control the game.

Guy finishes Super Mario Bros. with the lowest possible score.

"[The Zone] is that magical place where you’ve managed to fit the entire context of your current project in your head. With all this content in there, you can perform superhuman acts of productivity and creativity because you have the complete problem space at your mental disposal."

"Over the past decade, better technology has simply reduced the number of things that we need to care about. Lion is better technology. It marks the point where Mac OS X releases stop being defined by what's been added. From now on, Mac OS X should be judged by what's been removed."

"Apple Push Notification Wrapper is very simple (Python) tool to sending your notification to your apps on iPhone / iPod Touch devices."

"To cover the majority of testing needs, KIF comes with a number of factory test steps built in, such as 'tap this view,' 'turn on this switch,' or 'type this text.'"

Borderless transparent window... Might work.

Screen recording for Mac OS X.

I really like this A List Apart post. I've used it in essays and reports, and I come back to it when I (inevitably) forget how to do CSS viewport stuff. (Hey, Future Scott: it's `<meta name="viewport" content="width=540" />`)